Essay: The Irreducible Core of Politics

It is my opinion that unless politics has an irreducible core, then politics is a haphazard subject about which nothing can truly be known other than the fact that it involves negotiation and compromise between various ontologically isolated interests. In other words, unless the complexities which accrue to politics are evolved from a single original basis---and, by implication in this fallen world, from an occasional or systematic denial of that basis---, then no species of politics has anything in common with any other species of politics. In short, political history must have a single common ancestor, such that all species of politics are descended from a single progenitor.

But, this means that a denial of that common basis, whatever that basis be, is a mutation, and not a proper political species.

Nevertheless, all mutated forms of politics involve some of the form-and-substance of the original political 'common ancestor'. This is part of how politics becomes increasingly complex, and difficult to sort out despite what some think, in a civilization that allows dissent against that ancestor far more than it enjoins the preservation of that original form-and-substance.

Love, Romance, and Civilization: From Eden to the Present

The best wisdom which can arise merely from the present, fallen state of the world is all foolish, meaningless, and harsh, like the manner by which the ancient Spartans thought to ensure the superiority of their civilization.

Today, many of the teachers of knowledge ask---thinking they know the best single answer---: ‘What is true love?’ They teach only that youthful feelings of romance fade, and that true love is merely that which is committed to the spouse in spite of the eventual lack of romantic feeling; that true love is a ‘selfless’ thing which somehow gives of itself to the other despite all sense to which those youthful romantic feelings seem forever lost and fleeting, and ultimately meaningless and foolish.

What? Is God foolish for having created youth??? And, did God say that He would kill those who ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?

Nay, I say: Such teaching, and such sense, is ignorant-in-the-extreme of the world that was and still is: which now is merely the fallen version of its once deathless and naturally perfectly harmonious self. The world that was is very much present and real: despite that it now is fallen, it still is every bit as much as it was at the beginning, by the way in which the mind and heart tends to function despite the realities of disharmony and death. So, romance exists despite that everything is so disharmonious that romance cannot simply abide forever while untended.

The teachers of knowledge grant that romantic bliss cannot maintain itself on its own power. But, it never could: it was not made for a world of disharmony.
So, true love is not an empty-headed sort of selflessness like that to which too many wives are made to feel that they must resign themselves, and thus to feel guilty for having needs which ignorant and arrogant husbands are willing to believe do not exist, or, if such do exist, that these are contrary to their self-centered view of the nature of marriage. Rather, true love is a kind of selflessness which is in knowledge of the fact that romance, and all else of the original world, is never truly gone, but merely waits, like the man of dust, to be breathed into with the power of life and of the harmony of true knowledge.

So, I say, do not teach youth as if the original world never existed. For, in so being wise merely in terms of the fallen-ness of the world, you teach them to think that it does not matter whether that original state of the world ever existed, and thereby teach them that, in fact, it matters only to believe that it never did exist.

The Law of Moses commanded God’s own special national teachers to represent especially that part of the original state of the world, which was not a generic sense of the original constitution of the family, but was of the original and abiding place which endless, monogamous romance is designed to have in, and over, all society.

It takes no genius to recognize that civilization, and the progress of humanity on Earth, does not consist in its material products, however advanced, nor in the logistical infrastructures for distributing those products, nor even in the science that makes that production possible. Everyone with an at least halfway-balanced psyche admits, upon the requisite reflection, that civilization consists, principally, in the historical, moral, and metaphysical wisdoms that allow a kind of society which is able to produce plenty of material goods, and able to acquire the science that helps make that production possible.

So, it takes no genius to recognize that any of the wisdom which is born merely of the fallen state of the world, whether technological, scientific, or political, when acquired ambitiously against one’s adversaries, and over one’s fellows and fellow creatures, can, despite creating a certain short-term advantage over even the seeming competitors which are the needs of wives, only end in the destruction of the sublime backbone of civilization, if not of the Earth’s living ecology; namely, by destroying the integrity of the wider society through the undermining of the original harmony of the core human social unit: one man and one woman, in all their original glory. Death and disharmony does not make a lie out of that truth; rather, that truth, in the face of death and disharmony, shows God to be who He is: the Creator, Redeemer, and Ultimate Romantic.